Re: adaptive word scoring

[Hans de Graaff <J.J.deGraaff@twi.tudelft.nl>]

Felix Lee <flee@teleport.com> writes:

> so after using adaptive word scoring for a while, I've decided that
> it's mostly useless.

One thing that struck me is the defaults for word scoring. They cause
scores to increase of decrease at an incredible rate, making all
scores useless. I've changed the scores to -1 and 1, and this seems to
work much better. I also think that line scoring is more important
than word scoring (i.e. word scoring to extrapolate to subjects which
have not been scored yet), so setting the word scores to some small
number makes much more sense than the current defaults.

> say you're an avid fan of alt.sex.pictures.emacs.  the word "gif" is
> fairly common and mostly neutral: you can't tell if an article is
> interesting based on the word "gif".

Yes, this doesn't work well. I've noted this also in other groups
(e.g. comp.fonts), and have decided that in those cases it's no big
deal, because it means that more descriptive subjects get better
ratings.

Hans